Rogue of the Week: Windows Recovery

Word from the AMR group last week was that there weren’t many changes from the previous week; Many of the same rogue antivirus previously reported in this blog continue to plague the Internet.

This week I decided to focus on a rogue that’s recently become a problem. It goes by the name Windows Recovery, though it’s also been called Ultra Defragger or HDD Rescue by other AV vendors. Bottom line, it’s still a fraudulent program which relies on deception and trickery to convince a victim to fork over some cash for a “fix.” It’s just not a rogue antivirus; Call it a rogue system utility. Fortunately, the damage caused by this rogue is actually relatively straighforward to manually clean up.

The gist of this rogue’s deception comes down to trying to convince the victim that their computer hard drive has experienced some sort of major malfunction. To accomplish this, the rogue does a lot of sneaky stuff: For instance, it flags all files on the boot drive with the “hidden” attribute, then uses registry tricks to prevent Windows from displaying any hidden icons.

It also moves any shortcuts that point to programs (both from the start menu and on the desktop) into the Temp folder, effectively neutering the utility of the Start menu. (We have a free tool that can fix this.) And it uses the Registry to disable the user’s ability to open the Task Manager, changes the system wallpaper (and prevents you from changing that wallpaper), and hides the entire desktop from view. (And we have another free tool that can fix this, too.)

When I ran the Windows Recovery installer on my clean testbed, the program started up right away but sat idling for a while. After a few minutes, it started to display error messages. The dialog box, labeled Hard Drive Failure claims The system has detected a problem with one or more installed IDE / SATA hard disks. It is recommended that you restart the system. If you do restart, you’re in for a world of hurt.

That’s because meanwhile, in the background, the rogue (running from the Application Data folder under the All Users profile) marked all files on the C: drive as “hidden,” modified the registry so those hidden files would appear to vanish after a reboot, wiped out the Internet Explorer favorites, and moved all the shortcuts pointing to programs that were in the Start menu and desktop into nested folders within the %temp%smtmp folder.

After the reboot, Windows didn’t start itself up normally. The rogue had hidden everything, and kicked itself into “scanning” mode.

When it was finished, boy did it look like I was in trouble.

Among the messages the program displayed about the state of the testbed computer, Windows Recovery claims:

Next, it goes through the motions to make it look like it’s actually fixing some stuff. Really fancy animations and little squares that flash on and off in different colors, like a computer console from Star Trek, the original series.

Remember, nothing on the testbed system is malfunctioning, and any problems were caused by the rogue itself.

The program claims that it is capable of fixing some of the problems it alleges it discovered; Of course, the rest can be fixed for a low, low price: The one set by the rogue’s creators. An example of mean-spirited, coercive “sales” in its lowest form.

It’s possible to reverse most of the modifications the rogue made to the system manually. But you’ll have to use keyboard shortcuts to get it done. If you normally navigate by clicking folders or the My Computer icon, those things won’t be there. However, you can use keyboard shortcuts: hold down the Windows key and type E to bring up Explorer; Windows – R brings up the Run dialog. From the Run dialog you can launch any program.

To reverse the hidden files issue, you can just run the same command that Windows Recovery did, in reverse, from the Run dialog. The command to use is:

attrib -h "C:*.*" /s /d

Enter that command exactly as shown, and click OK. But you’re not done, yet.

Here’s the list of registry keys the rogue modifies, and the values it sets for those keys. If you’re comfortable modifying the Registry, you can revert these changes by switching the ones for zeroes, or vice versa. Just remember, you can do more damage to your computer and render it unbootable if you don’t know what you’re doing, so only modify the Registry if you are familiar with it.